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Couchbase Raises $60 Million to Fuel NoSQL Database Efforts

By Sean Michael Kerner

It takes a lot of money to build a database company in an industry dominated by giants like Oracle, Microsoft and IBM. It's a lesson that open-source NoSQL database startup Couchbase knows well as it continues to raise funding to build its business.

Couchbase officially announced on June 26 that it has raised an E round of financing valued at $60 million. The new round of funding comes just under a year after Couchbase raised its D round of funding which brought in $25 million. Total funding for Couchbase now stands at $115 million.

Among the new investors in the Series E round is Accel Growth Fund, which is pumping money into Couchbase in a bid to capitalize on the Big Data marketplace.

"Couchbase is in a great position to disrupt the database market," Kevin Efrusy, partner at Accel, said in a statement. "It is building momentum with Oracle replacements and demonstrating continued competitive success over other NoSQL vendors."

Couchbase of course isn't the only NoSQL vendor that could potentially be a big winner in the Big Data market. MongoDB is also very active and increasingly popular in the space. But Couchbase CEO Bob Wiederhold says Couchbase provides functionality that neither Oracle nor MongoDB can deliver.

"Business have spent years trying to get Oracle to efficiently scale, or looked to MongoDB to experiment with small projects on non relational infrastructures,” Wiederhold said in a statement. "But as these companies become more dependent on applications that simply cannot perform or scale on MongoDB or Oracle, they are turning to Couchbase. That is because Couchbase Server is designed and built to deliver the scale and performance needed by next-generation infrastructure."

From a technology perspective, the most recent release of Couchbase Server debuted in February with the Couchbase 2.5 update. The Couchbase 2.5 server update included enhancements for high availability and cross data center (XDCR) data encryption for secure data center replication.

The big technology breakthrough for Couchbase was its 2.0 release that debuted in 2012, providing both key-value and document data models. The 2.0 release was also the first to include Cross Data Center Replication (XDCR) technology, which enables the database to be deployed across multiple data centers and all the instances will stay in sync with each other. XDCR has been improved in subsequent release of Couchbase since 2.0.

Couchbase as a company was formed back in 2011 as a merger of CouchOne and Membase.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Database Journal and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist